Saturday, November 26, 2016

Seconds to Midnight by Philip Donlay

The Eco-Watch research Citation jet is on assignment to study a solar storm’s effects on the northern lights in arctic Canada. The routine data gathering flight is interrupted when a 737 dives through the clouds nearly causing a midair collision. The Eco-Watch pilot manages to evade the 737. Co-pilot and Eco-Watch director, Donovan Nash, is horrified to see the jet’s rear door open and something is shoved out into the deathly cold of the Canadian winter.

The 737 spirals down in a descent that is one part crash and one part landing approach. The Jet manages to land on a frozen lake, but the ice cracks under the jet’s weight, but not before a passenger crawls out a window, scrambles up the wing, then jumps in the water and struggles to get back on the firm ice and crawl to the shore.

Nash orders his pilot to find a way to land the Citation on a distant part of the lake. Nash and a couple of his team trudge through the snow and find a near frozen woman and bring her back on board the plane. Her only words before passing out are a warning that they all are going to be killed. When she wakens, what remains of her memory comes in rare flashes, little of which are of help in determining her identity or how she came to be on the doomed flight.

Too much is unknown, so Nash makes the decision to keep as much about what has happened from both the Canadian and US authorities. The girl’s warning spooks Nash and puts his wife and daughter, currently on vacation in Austria, on alert. His wife Lauren is a GIS specialist with the US and has a rep as being highly resourceful when cornered.

Nash calls on an Eco-Watch employee with diving expertise to haul a ton of equipment up to join him in Minneapolis so they can get into the 737 now resting at the bottom of the frozen lake. Meanwhile, Lauren and daughter are targeted by unknowns and on the run to Scotland, then Poland, and finally the Russian embassy.

This book is #9 in the Donovan Nash series. A ridiculously fast paced book. I doubt anyone who picks this up will take more than a day or two to finish. Do I now have to go back through books #1-8? Only time will tell.


East Coast Don

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